There’s also a tradition of American writers who come to Paris to escape the US. Baldwin, one of Coates’s role models, said the city gave him the gift of ignoring him. For a black American, that felt like freedom. “I feel that, too,” Coates agrees, “which I think is different to saying there’s no racism here. But when I talk to people here, the first thing they sense is about [my] Americanness. That’s the mask I have on for them. It’s an incredible experience. This is the first place I’ve been where I felt people saw something different. It allows for greater comfort walking down the street.” The fragility of the black American teenage male’s body being a particular theme of his books, you can see another reason why Coates has brought his son to Paris. Piquantly, the boy, Samori, is named after a west-African military leader who resisted the French colonists.

“I think there’s something else, too,” he adds, as we eat the unadorned fresh seafood with little of the usual embarrassment of strangers sharing a plate of food. “There are a lot of guns in America. I’m not saying there’re no guns here, but significantly fewer. I think you feel that in the public space. When I walk down Canal Saint-Martin and I see people with open bottles of wine, sitting there, in my American eyes I think about that in a public space and I think about people getting shot. Somebody gets too drunk, bumps into somebody and then somebody pulls out a gun.”

Well now. First off, good for him. If I had hit the financial jackpot like TNC has done with his work in the past year, I would do the same thing. As you know, I did a much more modest thing with some of the advance money for Little Way, taking my family to Paris for a month in a rented apartment. A whole year? Wow. Fantastic!

That said, it’s funny that he is financing a year in a chic Paris neighborhood from the proceeds of a nihilistic bestseller denouncing America is a hellhole for black people. America made TNC rich! It’s even funnier, if you ask me, than a dude financing a month in Paris from an advance on a book about embracing the simplicity of small-town life — because of the radical chic element.

I think that TNC remark above about how unlike the French, Americans can’t have a bottle of wine in public without somebody pulling a gun, inadvertently reveals the parochial narrowness of TNC’s vision of his own country. In non-ghetto parts of America, it is generally the case that people can and do enjoy drinking in public without fear of gunfire. He’s generalizing the criminal pathologies of the kinds of neighborhood in which he was raised, and applying it to the entire country. This is the kind of thing that makes his writing about race and America so frustrating.

I’m on the record as judging his Between the World and Me a bad book, mostly because it is tendentious, and does not ring true. I am also on the record a couple of years ago saying that I wish somebody would pay TNC to go live in Paris for a year and write about that experience. So now it looks like it will happen. I hope he rediscovers what attracted me to him as a writer in the first place: his ability to look at old things with fresh eyes, and to convey the pleasure of discovery. For instance, I love in the FT interview how he owns his hokey passion for Paris (a hokey passion I share), and I love how he admits that he loves Paris in particular for the food. James Baldwin wrote beautifully about how he went to Paris to escape American racism, but found out that it’s impossible to escape human frailty. He was unjustly imprisoned in France for eight days, and discovered that even in his dream city, one has to face the reality of arbitrary power being brought to bear against one. I think that is what TNC has tried — with some success — to help white Americans understand about the black experience. I would add, though, that the state is not the only actor capable of using force arbitrarily against individuals. But that point is for another day.

Maybe TNC will come home from this incredible blessing of a year in Paris with the ability to see his own country more clearly.UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that in this blog, I made several unwarranted assumptions about TNC and his year in Paris. Let me make this clear: I know that he is working while he’s in Paris, and I do not for a second believe that he didn’t earn this year in Paris from his work. I did not like BTWAM, but the man is a writer, and he earns his living fair and square. I regret the impression that I meant otherwise. I genuinely look forward to the book he writes out of this experience. As I said in this space a year or two ago, that’s a book I will want to read.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 89 comments

89 Responses to Famous Black Radical Makes Chic Move

“But all things considered, whatever your race, you are much safer from gun violence in a suburban movie theater or a rural Pacific Northwest college than in West Baltimore or the South Side of Chicago”

Agreed.

And, all things considered, you are safer from gun violence in Europe than the United States. It’s not just size and population either…China does have this problem.

Look, every society has its issues. I wouldn’t trade the U.S. for any country in the world, gun violence and all.

I do have to find it amusing that an internte space where the belief that the US is rapidly becoming a dystopian, ant-Christian, anarchist totalitarian space (and Europe is already one, plus it is about to be overran by Muslim hordes) is more or less consenuse, then turns around and tsk-tsks people for being too sensitive about the gun issue and not taking things in perspective, while berating Coates for not appreciating how good life is in the old US of A?

I hope he enjoys his time and perhaps even have it heal him a bit. I pray for his soul because from reading his writings it appears to have been damaged in some way.

Thanks Camus. I read him for a long time, and you’ve stated my impression better than I could have.

Perhaps his damage is a result of or is connected to his race, perhaps not. There are plenty of damaged white people, after all. And plenty of undamaged blacks.

There are “mass” shootings (I think “mass” here means two or more victims) and then there is ghetto gun violence. These are quite different categories, but people here are conflating them.

There have been x mass shootings in the past 5 years (use more years to inflate the number, for effect) and y gun deaths…it sounds like all of y occurred as a part of x, but that isn’t the case.

I go to bars and sidewalk restaurants quite frequently. I am not in the slightest afraid that I’m going to get shot. I’m probably more likely to be killed when some driver veers onto the sidewalk for some reason.

The problem with “mass” shootings is that the click-bait media reports obsessively on each and every one, while deaths in car crashes are buried in some statistic somewhere.

He’s writing for his tribe; you’re writing for yours. I gain much by reading both of you.

This isn’t exactly true in either case, if only because the “tribes” we’re talking about are small, and in Coates’ case, most of them don’t buy books by writers for The Atlantic. Coates in particular certainly writes for white people, and that’s why he won an award. There are apparently a lot of relatively wealthy, educated white people who like his work

I don’t, much, because I don’t enjoy being blamed for things I had nothing to do with by someone who is trying to make me feel guilty, but a lot of people disagree with me on that point.

Incidentally, while western Europe has a lot less murders, they also have a lot of violent crime in general, including robbery and rape.

Of all the countries in Western Europe (or all of Europe for that matter) only Sweden and Belgium have higher rates of rape per population. Sweden is an outier, with a rate more than double the United States, but some of that can be explained by a more expansive definition of rape. Sweden’s neighbors, Norway and Finland, report rape rates one-third that of Sweden.

Belgium’s rate is almost the same as the U.S.’s, only a fraction of a percent higher.

@Rod
“Seems to me that some of y’all just cannot bear a word of criticism uttered about TNC.”

Well, I’ll just speak for myself. I have no problem with criticism of TNC. I share some of it. Your point that his experience growing up in Baltimore does not reflect the reality of the entire country, agreed! His dark period is not my cup of tea.

That said, substitute Rod Dreher for TNC/Coates in these snippets:

@anori
“You really have to wonder whether TNC has ever seen a restaurant with outdoor seating.”

@Patrick
“He likes Paris because there aren’t any violent black people in Paris.”

@DS
“TNC is able to afford Paris because his race has made him a success in the U.S.”

@Robert G
“And all this as he cashes his fat checks, takes expensive vacations, and soaks up the admiration of his wilfully idiot admirers.”

@Johan
“. . . a total hustler, but he knows how to manipulate the situation (and clueless admirers) to get the big payoff.”

I once commented on a blog post by Coates, at the Atlantic. I merely questioned one of his statistics, and the conclusion he drew from them. He deleted my comment, and in its place put in the words, “Banned! Off to Stormfront with you!” So I was banned from further comments.

But I didn’t write something remotely controversial to people who were considering the actual facts of his topic. Because I (politely) disagreed and challenged his argument, he presumed I was a white nationalist or white supremacist (which I am decidedly not). That experience gave me insight into how thin-skinned and provincial he really is.

I would submit to you, as well, that I cannot imagine that anyplace Coates has ever lived has had a higher rate of gun ownership, either legal or illegal, than Elk County. I just talked to a nun who hunts in a full habit. She reloads her own ammo.

So, you will say, those are just tiny little places! Well, Altoona isn’t exactly Paris, but it’s not Mayberry, either, and it has a lower rate of homicides per 100,000 than either Paris or France writ large. So does State College. Scranton is close.

So. If Coates was really picking a spot based on safety, vis-a-vis gun ownership and alcohol, he should have moved to… Altoona.

Re: If you still insist on being more afraid of mass shootings than car accidents, then yes, I think ‘hysterical’ is exactly the right word.

True, but that metric applies to more than just car accidents. What about people who are constantly fretting over terrorism, which is far rarer than gun violence in this country? What about the anti-vax crowd who parlay the very rare serious adverse reaction to vaccines into a crusade to stop vaccinating period? I’m sure others can think up more examples as well.

Re: There are “mass” shootings (I think “mass” here means two or more victims) and then there is ghetto gun violence.

And even in mass shootings there is a distinction to be made between guys (male words used on purpose) who go off the deep end and kill family/friends/neighbors over some wildly exaggerated, perhaps imagined, slight and those who go off the deep end and pick a public spot where they target multitudes of total strangers. The former are brutally common (in the sense that you can find such incidents in the news regularly), the latter are thankfully rare.

Re: (I used to kind of like some of his stuff, but that’s before he went on tangents about abortion, the race/IQ stuff, communism, Russia, and 20th century history that show he interprets most of history through the narrow lens of the civil rights struggle.

Hector, I’ve read Coates regularly as long as I’ve read Rod. I can recall exzactly one post by him on the subject of abortion, a more-or-less personal one invioling his wife’s difficult, possibly life-threatening pregnancy and how he felt that since it was her life on the line he had no business truying to impose his decision on her (of course she continued the pregnancy as the couple have a son, the one to whom the book was addressed.) I also do not recall anything objectional in his posts on the bloody history of Eastern Europe (after his reading “Bloodlands” I Think). As for “race/IQ” many of us are extreme skeptics on that subject– and the history of racist misuse of such data should be enough to allow some complaint about it.
I know you got banned there, but that was toward the end when Coates’ blog, and the Atlantic in general, was getting overrun by bona fide trolls intent on shouting down any reasoned discussion. A sad end to what used to be a scintillating site for opinion and debate.

So. If Coates was really picking a spot based on safety, vis-a-vis gun ownership and alcohol, he should have moved to… Altoona.

I am sure that the same thing could have been said about Douglas County, Oregon prior to yesterday, but that did not stop 10 people from being killed for no reason other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

And one of these days, some angry mentally unbalanced young man with access to guns will end Altoona’s safety record.

Yes. So, it would make sense that Coates, an African-American who grew up in Baltimore would be more concerned about the possibility of homicide than Rod Dreher, who is a white American who lives in small town Louisiana with, one would suspect, less than 2.5 per 100,000 homicide rate.

Likewise, Coates, an atheist, would be less concerned about “religious liberty” than Rod Dreher, a devout Catholic. Furthermore, it would make sense that Coates would write about growing up black in America, while Dreher would write about returning to and reconnecting with his small town roots. Furthermore squared, it would make sense that folks on Coates blog (when he was blogging) would largely agree with his views, but those who disagreed with him often contributed important, broadening views. Same can be said for Rod’s site here.

@Sam M
“Interesting stats. The homicide rate in rural Elk County, PA, where I live, is 0.0 per 100,000. Don’t believe me?”

I absolutely believe you. I have lived in such communities myself, and I enjoyed them very much.

@Sam M
“Well, Altoona isn’t exactly Paris, but it’s not Mayberry, either, and it has a lower rate of homicides per 100,000 than either Paris or France writ large. So does State College. Scranton is close. So. If Coates was really picking a spot based on safety, vis-a-vis gun ownership and alcohol, he should have moved to… Altoona.”

Or to a small town/city in Southern France. Or Iceland. Or Japan. Then he could have low homicide and low gun ownership rates! And Sapporo. But, sadly, no Rolling Rock.

And if you love Altoona, great! Seriously. If Coates likes Paris, and he perceives a nice contrast with his experiences in Baltimore and elsewhere, I don’t think that in any way should take away from your enjoyment of Altoona.

I’m interested in what Dreher AND Coates have to say, even though I disagree with both on a number of issues.

@Zorro
“Coates in particular certainly writes for white people, and that’s why he won an award. There are apparently a lot of relatively wealthy, educated white people who like his work. . . .”

True, I should have been more precise.

By tribe, I mean “like minded people”, not “black”. Coates knows whites buy and read his work. In my experience, Coates doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about folks who say/write “Yeah, well the Republicans freed the slaves, not the Democrats!” Likewise, Rod doesn’t suffer the folks who shout “Christians are nothing but bigots!”

Coates is writing to a slice of the possible readership out there, as is Rod, in my view. They’re both not geared to the mass audience.

In my experience, each has a different tribe who gets them and largely agrees with and gains from their writing.

That’s what I mean by “tribe”.

(Now that I’ve written this, I’m saying to myself, “petty point, who cares”?)

Look. There are plenty of reasons to prefer Paris to Altoona. To each his own. But if I say I prefer Paris because it’s smaller than Altoona, I am nuts or misinformed. If I say that I prefer Paris to San Francisco because I like to go to 49er games, that’s a terrible reason.

Similarly, the idea that you choose to live in France rather than in America because of a lesser likelihood of wine-induced massacres, that’s pretty weird. There are plenty of places in America where there are not massacres induced by people drinking wine on the streets. Yeah, I know, that was an off handed way for him to talk about violence. And I get that Paris is less violent than Baltimore considered broadly. But if he just wanted to avoid getting shot, he could have pretty easily wandered over to Roland Park, within Baltimore City limits. He could drink all the wine he wanted without getting shot there. Or he could have gone up to Reisterstown. Or Olney.

To get away from the violence in Baltimore, wine-related or otherwise, all he really had to do was leave the neighborhood he grew up in and avoid neighborhoods like it. But that does not fit with his preferred neighborhood that living in America puts “black bodies” at risk, and that this risk is what drove him to leave the country.

He could have achieved a greater level of safety for his black body in Altoona. I suspect, however, that he chose something else because instead of thrice-weekly $30 lunches at Glau, the best he might achieve there would be a fried pickle and a Roethlis-burger.

Which is fine! I don’t care. All I am pointing out is that one of the primary goals he cited for leaving America in favor of France could have been achieved many hundreds of miles closer to home. Like, maybe, a few blocks down the street or a spin down 95 to Ellicott City.

He like Paris. Great. He likes the food and the language and all the rest. Good for him. And congratulations on the MacArthur genius grant that’s helping to make it possible. Is he a genius? I think he probably is. But saying that he like France more than America because he has less to worry about from winos with uzis betrays a narrative run amok.

@Zorro I don’t, much, because I don’t enjoy being blamed for things I had nothing to do with by someone who is trying to make me feel guilty, but a lot of people disagree with me on that point.

Coates’ aim isn’t to make white people feel guilty. He simply posits that white supremacy was and is embedded in the laws of this country and that explains the present condition of black America. I wish he could be read without the belief that he is blaming the reader personally.

“This is the first place I’ve been were I felt people saw something different”. I’m pretty sure nobody is stopping him from also choosing to spend a year living in Nairobe and writing about his experience there too.

When I read about the MacArthur grant, I was astounded. The fact that they keep feeding this unbearable, race-baiting monster hack makes me sick to my stomach.

Bleh, no use in getting angry. Let TNC get fat eating French cheese and drinking French wine, all the while complaining about racism towards the Holy Sanctuary of the Black Body. Hell, he can make Paris the Mecca of his new religion for the worship of blackness. After all, the white man is paying the tab, so why should he care?

Of all the countries in Western Europe (or all of Europe for that matter) only Sweden and Belgium have higher rates of rape per population. Sweden is an outlier, with a rate more than double the United States, but some of that can be explained by a more expansive definition of rape.

I think a lot of it can be explained by third-world Muslim immigrants who are protected from criticism by the government.

Yes. So, it would make sense that Coates, an African-American who grew up in Baltimore would be more concerned about the possibility of homicide than Rod Dreher, who is a white American who lives in small town Louisiana with, one would suspect, less than 2.5 per 100,000 homicide rate.

Yes, but the point is that this amazingly high risk of gun violence he is worrying about is not a generic “American” thing, it’s a black thing.

This is probably due to the glow of short term living there. He’d probably become livid if he was an expat and spoke the language, because from what I read Europeans can be shockingly racist. The USA has its flaws, but we also have lived with each other for hundreds of years, and our sense of national identity is a lot weaker than theirs.

Instead of beautiful Marais, perhaps TNC should experience the Paris as a black man would — to one of the banlieues surrounding the capital. That book would certainly be more interesting than the inane reflections of wine-soaked soirees that his white audience will demand upon his return to the Atlantic.

[NFR: Well, I will eagerly read his accounts of wine-soaked soirées, and I’m not kidding about that. — RD]

Yes, but the point is that this amazingly high risk of gun violence he is worrying about is not a generic “American” thing, it’s a black thing.

I guess you haven’t met many “white” people… I mean the every day sort of “white” people, the ones who own guns and go to bars and sometimes shoot each other, or their wives, or whatever. Remember the song “That was the night the lights went out in Georgia”? Its a song, not a news article, but there wasn’t a purportedly black person in it. Before black actors were allowed roles outside of cameo appearances by domestic servants, movies had no shortage of material about violence, guns, feuds, etc. There were real life role models for those stereotypes.

Watch the debate between James Baldwin and William F Buckley on whether or not the American Dream came at the expense of the American Negro. Baldwin speaks eloquently about the psychological impact of being a black man in America, and Buckley retorts with a number of sentiments that are almost exactly what the opposition would say today if a similar debate was held today. It’s on youtube, it’s an hour long, and it’s worth the viewing.

TNC did us a service to unload his mind in Between the World and Me. In response, there has been no shortage of Buckleyisms penned to try and explain to him why he has America all wrong.

I don’t get the whole gun violence thing. It just sounds like making excuses for moving to Paris. Here’s a good reason for moving to Paris for a year: because you freaking can. If I could move to some other country for a year I would do it too.

Total crimes per 1000 61.03 Ranked 14th. 48% more than United States 41.29 Ranked 22nd.
Violent hate crime 37.77 Ranked 19th. 16% more than United States 32.55 Ranked 31st.Murders > Per 100,000 people 1.6 Ranked 105th. 5.9 Ranked 63th. 4 times more than France
Robberies 10.8 Ranked 14th. 146.4 Ranked 10th. 14 times more than France
Murders 682 Ranked 37th. 12,996 Ranked 9th. 19 times more than France
Murders per million people 10.54 Ranked 98th. 42.01 Ranked 43th. 4 times more than France

By almost any standard you care to pick, France is a far safer place than the US. The Charlie Heddo massacre happened in January and killed 11 and wounded 11, how many other mass shooting have occurred in France since? how many have occurred in the US in the same time period?

Murder rate in NYC versus Paris is 6.0 versus 4.4. Higher? Sure. Of course, Paris sequesters it’s violent criminals in the suburban slums. Just as important, rich people don’t have to live in the slums anywhere. For instance, look where TNC lives in Paris. Not the slums!

Plus you keep moving the goal posts. A mass shooting you view as likely in Altoona should be taken into account, even though it hasn’t happened. Actual mass shootings in Paris don’t count.

Look. Let’s say someone lives is Barrow, Alaska. That person moves to Fiji and tells an interviewer, I had to get out of America. It sucks because it’s cold there.

Well, uh… Maybe Barrow is. But there are plenty of places in America that are not Barrow.

And there are plenty of places in America that are not west Baltimore. And, in fact, are significantly safer that Paris.

True, but that metric applies to more than just car accidents. What about people who are constantly fretting over terrorism, which is far rarer than gun violence in this country? What about the anti-vax crowd who parlay the very rare serious adverse reaction to vaccines into a crusade to stop vaccinating period? I’m sure others can think up more examples as well.

Um, yes, I think people who worry overmuch about terrorism (in America) are being hysterical too, and my feelings about the anti-vaxxer crowd are unprintable on a family blog.

Yes, but the point is that this amazingly high risk of gun violence he is worrying about is not a generic “American” thing, it’s a black thing.

It actually, really, is mostly a Black thing. Not a ‘poverty’ or even ‘nonwhite’ thing. White Americans are actually not at much risk of being murdered (higher than Finns and lower than Latvians). Black people, on the other hand, have a risk of being murdered equivalent to Nigerians or Mexicans. If TNC just wanted to be someplace where you can drink in safety without getting shot at, there are, as Sam M points out, plenty of places in the US where you could do that. He could go to Altoona, or North Dakota, or for that matter Vermont, all of which have high alcohol consumption and not a lot of murders.

This is not to *blame* African Americans or to exonerate them- I don’t know why African American communities have such a high murder rate (substantially higher than Black people in places like Barbados for example, not to mention higher than most African countries)- and I’m sure TNC’s remarks about residential segregation play some role, as well as other factors. However, if we want to solve the problem of America’s excessive murder rate, it’s important that we first properly diagnose what the problem is, and the key element there is that America’s murder rate is extremely, extremely demographically localized to one ethnic group. It is simply nonsense to spout platitudes like ‘no place in America is safe from gun violence’.

I suspect this is part of why liberals and conservatives on the gun-control issue (and specifically black liberals and white conservatives) have so much mutual incomprehension when talking about the costs and benefits of gun ownership. In most of white America (the more dysfunctional bits of the south and Appalachia aside), as Dominic and Sam M point out, people do have plenty of guns laying around and drink plenty of alcohol (more than Black people) without any serious risk of gunplay ensuing. In Black America, not so much. Which is why America’s murder problem is, for most white people, especially those ones who don’t (e.g.) have a lot of Black friends or a Black girlfriend, go to a Black church, etc., entirely an abstract issue that they don’t internalize.

I am sure that the same thing could have been said about Douglas County, Oregon prior to yesterday, but that did not stop 10 people from being killed for no reason other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

You do get that mass shootings like the Umpqua College one, as tragic as they are for the people involved and as damnable on the part of the shooter, are not actually statistically that meaningful, right? If you live in a place like Douglas County, your risk of getting killed was low last week and continues to be low this week. If you live in a Black section of Houston or Chicago, let alone Baltimore or Detroit, not so much.

Within France’s urban ‘police zone’, the observatory recorded 430 murders, a 2.3 percent drop from 2011 and in the more rural ‘gendarmerie zone,’ 235 murders were recorded – a 22.4 percent drop compared to last year.

Pick any place in France, compare it to it’s US equivalent, that French location will be far safer than it’s US equivalent.

One thing a lot of commenters seem not to understand: the danger to black people, especially black men, is not limited to West Baltimore and similar places. We’ve had a spate of news stories about black men– and even children– shot or otherwise killed by trigger-happy authorities. While some of these stories (e.g., Freddie Gray) happened in bad neighborhoods, others happened in places we would regard as safe. Coates’ book highlights the story of a college friend– one Prince Jones. His mother had done the classic (and believed by conservatives) of lifting herself by her own boot-straps (out of Louisiana poverty) to become a highly paid medical professional; she gave her son an upper middle class life in utterly “safe” places. Yet one day he was tailed by an undercover police officer (who was dressed in ghetto drug-dealer attire) who followed him across state lines and under unclear circumstances found reason to shoot him dead. (The cop even admitted later that he never identified himself as a policeman when the trouble started). Does anyone see something amiss with a result like that? Just living in some Upper Snobovia far from the madding crowds and with all the outward trappings of privilege is no defense for black people. And the killings are just the tip of the iceberg; below that lies a myriad of injustices, petty harassments, and stupid assumptions. Now, to be sure, white people are sometimes harassed or worse by power-trippy cops (happened to me when I was 18), but if whites experienced the sort of outrages small and great that are routinely visited on black people, we would have a revolution.